Text encoding libraries for PHP

• mbstring is PHP’s multibyte string extension, enabled in almost every PHP installation. mb_check_encoding validates UTF-8, mb_detect_encoding picks the first matching encoding from a list you give it, and mb_convert_encoding converts between UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows code pages, ISO-8859, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, GB18030, Big5 and more.

PHP also has the iconv extension with iconv() (the C iconv API), which supports //TRANSLIT for approximating characters. There’s no maintained statistical detector for PHP; mbstring’s detection only checks which candidates are valid, so order your candidate list carefully.

• mbstring PHP's mbstring extension detects and converts text encodings: validate UTF-8, convert Windows-1252 or Shift_JIS files to UTF-8, strip a BOM. Code examples.